Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 156

To the Trumpoids: It is You Who Made This a Choice Between Trump and Clinton

This is an expanded version of a response to a comment on my MoS column item about Donald Trump. Like almost all pro-Trump comments it was couched in the form ���So you think Hillary Clinton is better, then, do you? Are you a warmonger or what?���

Well, of course I am not a warmonger and I believe I may have been one of those included in Mrs Clinton���s long-ago denunciation of a supposed ���vast right-wing conspiracy��� against the Clintons.  I do not like or love the Clintons and have many criticisms of them. But this does not oblige me to like or support Mr Trump either. 

Why cannot the defenders of Mr Trump avoid the 'Hillary is worse' argument? Is it because it is all they really have?

I have never said she was better. I would have an absolute objection to Mr Trump on the basis of the kind of person I think him to be, as a result of his own undisguised, unconcealed public behaviour and his unembarrassed, even boastful chosen statements.

As it is absolute, I would maintain it if he was standing against the Devil Himself. 

And, as I should not have thought needed pointing out, it is not compulsory to vote for either candidate. Perhaps Mr Trump cannot be stopped, but at least American voters are free to be morally clean of the act of voting for him.

There are times when there is a stronger duty not to vote than to vote. This could be one of them .

And I am shocked at the willingness of American 'conservative' voters to fall so flaccidly, fawningly and sycophantically for Mr Trump's crude pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap propaganda skills,  and his muscleman machismo, like one of those body-building advertisements from a 1950s comic. When a campaign is aimed at inadequates and weaklings, as this sort of thing always is, surely it is a sign of maturity to reject it? 

By doing this it was they who eliminated all alternatives,  to secure him the Republican nomination.

They did this while his unlovely personal characteristics have been on full display. There were other possibilities, by no means as bad as Hillary. They destroyed them all in the adulatory frenzy of Trumpoid worship.

They are the ones who have created the choice between him and Hillary, which I would blame nobody for turning away from.

Now they have the nerve to tell us that , by rejecting their idol, whom they have worked so hard to turn into the only alternative to Hillary, we must automatically become Hillary supporters. It is not so.

Even if it were, it was a choice they must have seen coming, which they actively worked for, which they have themselves created and can���t blame others for disliking.

I am also puzzled that people are so readily persuaded by Mr Trump���s adoption of some supposed ���policies���, which they like. I might like some of them too, but I am not so easily bought, thank you. What if he has, in the manner of quite a few political figures in history, adopted them because voters like them, not because he does, or because he has any real interest in them or in implementing the?

I believe he has been consistent in his view of global trade, though it is hard to see how free he will be to do anything about this if he is elected.  But all else seems to me to be adopted for the moment, in some cases quite deliberately to shock and distress one group, thus pleasing and wooing that group's enemies. There's a word for this, one associated with the Clintons as it happens, but I can't quite recall what it is. 

In short, having chosen him as the Republican nominee, they now try to argue that anyone who didn't and doesn't agree with them is a Hillary supporter(implication : get with the programme, buster) .

This is the behaviour of people with totalitarian minds. Those who are not with us, they believe, are against us. When this combines with the (always worrying) belief that a majority decides all things, it scares me. It should scare you too.  

Some thoughts on 'Addiction from a 'neuroscientist'

Readers here will know that I don't think much of 'neuroscience'. Any science is as strong as its weakest component, just as a chain is as strong as its weakest link. This new discipline contains some soft pseudosciences such as 'psychology' and yet has largely supplanted (in the pubic and medical mind) the hard, limited true science of neurology. It also seems to me to have grown up in step with the  new tendency to treat mental illness with pills, rather than through analysis or by long-term confinement in mental hospitals.

 

But I think even less of 'addiction' one of many lazily-accepted concepts in the modern world which are in fact abdications of responsibility for our actions, failures and inactions, dressed up as science ('dyslexia' and 'ADHD', often discussed here, are in the same category).

 

I think in time these ( and other features of modern life) will go the way of 'neurasthenia' and 'brain fever' and other pseudo-medical terms and fancies of the past. So will the 'treatments' given to them, which will become as discredited as lobotomies now are, and as electro-convulsive therapy, and certain drugs discussed here from time to time,  jolly well ought to be.

 

So imagine my mixed feelings when 'The Times' of Monday 25th July publuished extracts from  the neuroscientist Marc Lewis's new book happily entitled: 'The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease'

 

Well, quite, and if it is not a disease, what is it? And why should we accept it as an excuse for our actions?  MediaMogul

 

 

 

How Many Times Do I Have to Say it?

I am not defending Islam, And I am not saying there is a single cause for rampage killings.

 

This interesting posting (with emphases added) from Monday 7th December 2015 shows that I have been repeatedly making this clear for months. Yet I am still being accused of these things in comments posted today.

'....The other is the San Bernardino shooting,  in which 14 people died and 21 were injured by a married couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. This event was initially reported simply as a gun massacre, but has since been ���nationalised���, as Sir Simon Jenkins says, by being classified by President Obama as a terror outrage. Is this wise or useful?

Well, maybe. I keep an open mind on all such claims, though continue to insist on testable actual evidence of terrorist connections and motive, rather than unsourced claims and the whisperings of security men and their media patsies,  before accepting that they are in any way centrally directed. There���s also the usual talk of ���radicalisation���, a speculation that doesn���t explain how even the wildest ideas translate themselves (as they do so rarely) into violent action.

The possibility that we may be dealing with unhinged people, not in full command of themselves, has been pushed into the background by the current preoccupation with Islamic State, which has now wholly replaced the (largely mythical) Al Qaeda, as the Official Octopus of global terror. This of course means nobody is looking into how they might have become unhinged, preferring to trawl through their travel, phone and computer records in the hope of finding some link between Raqqa and San Bernardino, just as we once sought similar links between every terror outrage in the world and an imaginary cave in Afghanistan.

Islamic State does certainly exist in Syria and Iraq, but I think we must be free to doubt how closely its distant franchises are linked to the central body. Also, if Islamic State wishes to strike at the USA, why would it choose to do so at a centre for the developmentally disabled in Southern California? I���ve struggled to learn much about the row Farook and Malik appear to have had with another guest at the party at the centre, before leaving to fetch their guns and bombs. Such things, surely interesting to any crime investigator searching for motive, get lost once ���terror��� is the explanation.

Well, now look at today���s ���Australian���  

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/san-bernardino-massacre-a-hatred-beyond-reason/news-story/5af7a1b4463bc493a852a0f634a73ab5

This opens : ���Spilt across their cluttered kitchen counter was the last meal enjoyed by Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Farook. Along with orange juice and paratha bread were bottles of Adderall and Xanax pills, prescribed to steady the nerves.���

 

Who says they were ���prescribed to steady the nerves���? Who knows that they were prescribed at all? Who says this was their purpose? Maybe an interview with the doctor involved was cut out at the last minute, but this seems to me like jumping to conclusions. Maybe the pills were prescribed.   But the misuse of Xanax is not exactly unknown. This amazing piece of presupposition allows the story to wander off immediately into all kinds of other directions.

What is Xanax, otherwise known as ���alprazolam���? Why, it���s a member of the happy, happy benzodiazepine family.   Look it up.  Adverse effects include suicidal ideation, our old friend. And its ���paradoxical reactions��� (that is, those you might not expect from a drug marketed as a tranquillizer) are aggression, rage , hostility, twitches and tremor, mania, agitation, hyperactivity and restlessness.

As for Adderall,  this is an amphetamine, of all things, mainly prescribed to children alleged to be suffering from the mythical complaint, ���Attention Deficit Disorder��� or its equally phantasmal relative ���Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder���.  No objective diagnosis has ever been established for these complaints yet they are ���treated��� with powerful mind-altering drugs. Amphetamines are totally banned in some countries, and heavily restricted in almost all jurisdictions. 

Malik and Farook had a six-month old baby, but even American ADHD/ADD fanatics have yet (I think)  to begin prescribing their ���medications��� to children so young. So we have to wonder what it was doing in their home. I know there is an increasing habit of 'diagnosing' adults with ADD, the child market having become saturated, but some of these drugs leak out of the legal market

Very high doses can result in psychosis, involving delusions and paranoia. A Wikipedia article says ���Recreational doses are generally much larger than prescribed therapeutic doses, and carry a far greater risk of serious side effects���.

Interestingly, its use is contraindicated in people suffering from severe anxiety, the same people who might be prescribed Xanax.  

I mention these things here, and place them in a proper context, for reasons well-known to regular readers. There appears to be a reliable correlation between outbreaks of homicidal violence (including violence classified as political) and the use of mind-altering drugs, whether legal or illegal. If we don���t investigate it, we will never find out of it is important.

Please don���t tell me I���m trying to excuse crimes, or take the heat off Islamist fanaticism. I am not. Not merely have I not said that I am, which ought to be enough for anyone short of the Thought Police.  I am here saying that I have no such motive. Please don���t tell me I���m offering a single cause. I am not.

25 murders and massacres, one common link... DRUGS

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

At one point a few days ago I feared to turn on the radio or TV because of the ceaseless accounts of blood, death and screams, one outrage after another, which would pour out of screen or loudspeaker if I did so.
And I thought that one of the most important questions we face is this: How can we prevent or at least reduce the horrifying number of rampage murders across the world?
Let me suggest that we might best do so by thinking, and studying. A strange new sort of violence is abroad in the world. From Japan to Florida to Texas to France to Germany, Norway and Finland, we learn almost weekly of wild massacres, in which the weapon is sometimes a gun, sometimes a knife, or even a lorry. In one case the pilot of an airliner deliberately flew his craft into a hillside and slaughtered everyone on board. But the victims are always wholly innocent ��� and could have been us.
I absolutely do not claim to know the answer to this. But I have, with the limited resources at my disposal, been following up as many of these cases as I can, way beyond the original headlines.
Those easiest to follow are the major tragedies, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the Nice, Orlando, Munich and Paris killings, the Anders Breivik affair and the awful care-home massacre in Japan last week. These are covered in depth. Facts emerge that do not emerge in more routine crimes, even if they are present.
Let me tell you what I have found. Timothy McVeigh, the 1995 Oklahoma bomber, used cannabis and methamphetamine. Anders Breivik took the steroid Stanozolol and the quasi-amphetamine ephedrine. Omar Mateen, culprit of the more recent Orlando massacre, also took steroids, as did Raoul Moat, who a few years ago terrorised the North East of England. So did the remorseless David Bieber, who killed a policeman and nearly murdered two others on a rampage in Leeds in 2003.
Eric Harris, one of the culprits of the Columbine school shooting, took the SSRI antidepressant Luvox. His accomplice Dylan Klebold���s medical records remain sealed, as do those of several other school killers. But we know for sure that Patrick Purdy, culprit of the 1989 Cleveland school shooting, and Jeff Weise, culprit of the 2005 Red Lake Senior High School shootings, had been taking ���antidepressants���.
So had Michael McDermott, culprit of the 2000 Wakefield massacre in Massachusetts. So had Kip Kinkel, responsible for a 1998 murder spree in Oregon. So had John Hinckley, who tried to murder US President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and is now being prepared for release. So had Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings pilot who murdered all his passengers last year. The San Bernardino killers had been taking the benzodiazepine Xanax and the amphetamine Adderall.
The killers of Lee Rigby were (like McVeigh) cannabis users. So was the killer of Canadian soldier Nathan Cirillo in 2014 in Ottawa (and the separate killer of another Canadian soldier elsewhere in the same year). So was Jared Loughner, culprit of a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona. So was the Leytonstone Tube station knife attacker last year. So is Satoshi Uematsu, filmed grinning at Japanese TV cameras after being accused of a horrible knife rampage in a home for the disabled in Sagamihara.
I know that many wish to accept the simple explanation that recent violence is solely explained by Islamic fanaticism. No doubt it���s involved. Please understand that I am not trying to excuse or exonerate terrorism when I say what follows.
But when I checked the culprits of the Charlie Hebdo murders, all had drugs records or connections. The same was true of the Bataclan gang, of the Tunis beach killer and of the Thalys train terrorist.
It is also true of the two young men who murdered a defenceless and aged priest near Rouen last week. One of them had also been hospitalised as a teenager for mental disorders and so almost certainly prescribed powerful psychiatric drugs.
THE Nice killer had been smoking marijuana and taking mind-altering prescription drugs, almost certainly ���antidepressants���.
As an experienced Paris journalist said to me on Friday: ���After covering all of the recent terrorist attacks here, I���d conclude that the hit-and-die killers involved all spent the vast majority of their miserable lives smoking cannabis while playing hugely violent video games.���
Now look at the German events, eclipsed by Rouen. The Ansbach suicide bomber had a string of drug offences. So did the machete killer who murdered a woman on a train in Stuttgart. The Munich shopping mall killer had spent months in a mental hospital being treated (almost certainly with drugs) for depression and anxiety.
Here is my point. We know far more about these highly publicised cases than we do about most crimes. Given that mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, are present in so many of them, shouldn���t we be enquiring into the possibility that the link might be significant in a much wider number of violent killings? And, if it turns out that it is, we might be able to save many lives in future.
Isn���t that worth a little thought and effort?

Vanishing websites - one more sign of America's madness

Whenever I am tempted to think (as I am often urged to do) that Donald Trump cannot possibly be  as bad as he looks,  I quickly learn  that he is worse. Everything about  him is fake, even his fakery. The website of his wife, Melania, suddenly vanished after an unauthorised  biography suggested  that she had  embroidered her  qualifications.  Why not either  deny it or admit it?  What madness  has possessed  Americans that they are even thinking of  electing her  husband?

If a trendy charity announced that it was holding seminars for burglars, to show them how to avoid being hurt in the course of breaking into our homes, you wouldn���t expect the police to approve. They may not care all that much about crime these days, but they���d have to put a stop to it.
Yet when a trendy charity offered to test illegal drugs for ���quality��� at a music festival in Cambridgeshire, the local police gave their blessing. The ���tests��� duly went ahead, and hundreds of squalid, selfish people went unpunished for blatant breaches of criminal law. All that users of illegal drugs need to know about quality is that they are dangerous. That���s why it is illegal to possess them.
For drug-taking, like burglary, is not a victimless crime. The victims are the families of the users, who must often spend many years picking up the pieces of broken lives, and us, the taxpayers, who must look after them, too. Whatever we pay the police for (and this is increasingly unclear to me) we do not pay them to undermine the law in this way. The Cambridgeshire force should be reminded that their salaries and offices are funded by taxes that would not be paid if the law was not widely obeyed and enforced.
If they undermine the law, they undermine themselves.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

If you can't be bothered to read this blog, please don't comment here

I wrote the words below in response to yet another comment from a person obsessed with the Islamic menace, who commented here in total ignorance of my point about rampage killings.

I reproduce it here as a warning. This blog is designed for intelligent and *responsive* discussion (this requires reading and responding to what the host says) of the issues raised. It is not yet another shouty forum for people who wish to get something off their chests but cannot find an audience elsewhere.

 

It is not very difficult to see that this chain of events (the series of recent killings, from Columbine to Rouen via Norway, Orlando, Finland, Nice, Paris, Brussels, Tunisia and Japan)  might not actually be wholly about Islam, when so many of these killings involve such people as irreligious British taxi drivers, Norwegian anti-Islamic fanatics, Finnish depressives, Southern racists from the US, other Americans (sometimes ex-service personnel) , High-school students, Korean college students, without any trace of Islamic interests or involvement, and now a Japanese citizen, similarly unfamiliar with Islam.

 

Of course, if you restrict your interest only to those killings where Muslims are involved, they will all feature Muslims.  Axiomatically.

 

Can anyone see a problem with this method of analysis?

 

But if you simply study *all* rampage killings, you will find that Islam is not a necessary condition, or even a sufficient condition for involvement. I have made this point several times now. I would regard it as a courtesy if contributors here at least acknowledged that I had made it, and wrote their contributions as if they had read it. I may have to institute a policy of deleting comments from people who clearly do not read this blog

 

I also take this opportunity to to reproduce here, in type so big that none can fail to see it,  my general caveat on my view of the apparent correlation between the use of mind-altering drugs (legal and illegal) and these events. Again, anyone who does not take account of this in future comments faces the strong possibility that their comments will be deleted and go unpublished.  

The usual caveat applies. All I am saying here is that ultra-violent crime is a subset of crime as a whole, which is distinguished by being thoroughly covered by the media. Thus information is available about the criminals which is not available about most criminals.  

I would like to see the police and courts compelled by law to investigate and record the drug use of all persons convicted of violent crime, and for the results of this recording to be the subject of an inquiry into an apparent correlation. I am not saying all cannabis users are terrorists. I am not saying all terrorists are cannabis users. I do not restrict my interest to cannabis, but am also interested in the use of prescription and other legal drugs, especially SSRI 'antidepressants' and steroids , such as were used by Anders Breivik and Omar Mateen, the Orlando murderer. That is all. Anyone who says I have said anything else is making it up. They will. Please disregard it.

Latest French Killer turns out to have history of mental illness

The Guardian, quoting the reputable French newspaper 'Le Monde' (not to my surprise) revealed today that Adel Kermiche, one of the killers of Father Jacques Hamel at St-Etienne de-Rouvray,  had severe mental health problems.

 

We may find out if this involved the use of legal or illegal drugs. We may not. However , Le Monde published sections of his legal file 'showing that since the age of six he had shown signs of ���psychological troubles��� for which he was regularly hospitalised.'

 

A neighbour told Le Figaro that Kermiche showed visible signs of mental disturbance. ���He was crazy, he was talking to himself.���

 

This makes it legitimate to ask, was this young man taking mind-altering drugs of any kind? A number of other issues arise, which I shall address in time. But I thought this revelation should be emphasised as soon as possible. 

 

 

Japan suspect was cannabis user - though you'd never know it from UK reports

Reports in Japan ( I am grateful to Ky, a contributor here, for this) state clearly that the suspect in the Japanese mass stabbing is a known cannabis user (a search for the name 'Uematsu' and 'marijuana', the term used in English-language reports from Japan, will produce this where the term more commonly used in Europe, 'cannabis' does not necessarily bring up results).

 

Here are some samples, one from an English-language Japanese newspaper, The Japan Times, and one from a French news website, 'Le Parisien'.

 

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/26/national/crime-legal/man-arrested-fatally-stabbing-15-people-wounding-45-kanagawa-facility-disabled-nhk/#.V5c0y45EIXl

http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/au-japon-un-homme-attaque-un-foyer-pour-handicapes-et-fait-19-morts-26-07-2016-5995293.php

 

 

There is no doubt about this. The correlation between the use of mind-altering drugs (legal and illegal and including steroids) and rampage killings, which I seek to emphasise and which I believe justifies an inquiry, continues to hold wherever it is investigated.

 

Surely this case, even more clearly than other recent ones in France and Germany, demonstrates that the key issue is neither Islamic fundamentalism nor gun control, however much Islamism and guns may be involved in some such killings.

 

But I have yet to see or hear any mention of the suspect's cannabis use on any British site or in any British broadcast. This lack of curiosity and interest continues to shock me.

 

 

More Facts on the Relation Between Mass Killings and Mind-Altering Drugs

Here are some further facts relevant to the discussion here on the influence of mind-altering drugs (illegal and legal)  in terror outrages and other rampage killings in Europe and North America:

I have just heard a German official say on BBC TV that the Ansbach suicide bomber had been in trouble with the authorities several times over drug offences. On the written web, this link http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/24/world/ansbach-germany-blast/ quotes Joachim Herrmann, Bavaria���s Interior Minister, as saying:

���The bomber was known to police in Ansbach for previous offenses, including drug crimes, Herrmann said. He had also twice attempted suicide before the bombing.���

Reports this morning noted that a Syrian who slashed a woman to death with a machete in Reutlingen, near Stuttgart, was likewise known to the police for ���assault and drug-related crimes���(my emphasis). 

We have also now learned that Ali David Sonboly, the German-Iranian Munich rampage killer,  ���spent two months in a psychiatric hospital being ���treated���(presumably drugged) for depression and anxiety. One report said ���It is not known if he had been taking medication he had been prescribed���. Nor has there been any information about illegal drugs (would anyone be surprised, given his age and lifestyle?), though an initial flurry about ���gun-control��� died down after it was revealed that Sonboly had got round Germany���s already ostensibly rather strict gun laws by buying a Glock pistol on the ���dark web���. So much ( as usual) for ���gun control���, which in practice is much more of a slogan than a fact.

I have as yet found no information to suggest drug use by the Wurzburg train attacker - not that this shows he was not a drug user, only that nobody has yet found out if he is, or even tried to do so.This also remains the case with the Dallas killer, Micah Johnson, whose case has now been more or less forgotten . 

 

Indeed the German authorities, who have their (Islamic) explanation of the Wurzburg episode already*, may not be interested in pursuing the matter further. The Wurzburg attacker, Riaz Khan Ahmadzai, aka Muhammad Riyad, was  a 17-year old alleged Afghan (though he may have been Pakistani)  who went wild on a train with a knife and a hatchet. He is now dead, as most such attackers are either by their own hands or at the hands of the police. The Thalys train assailant is a rare exception, and we���ve heard little of him lately). So he cannot be asked his motives. *There have been claims, as yet not confirmed, that he had displayed Islamic affiliations.  There are also pictures of him wearing a rather non-Islamic pink wig at a music festival.

We are already well aware of the Nice mass-murderer���s (Mohammed Lahouaiej Bouhlel) use of drugs, including marijuana and of him also having been ���depressed��� and having been in psychiatric ���care���. He was also known as a petty criminal, thug and thief, but not as a terrorist or fanatic, though there are now attempts by the French authorities to claim that he was a) radicalised in the last weeks of his life and b) involved a plot supposedly hatched many months before, which are contradictory. Let us see what happens when his alleged accomplices come to court.

 

Claims that he shouted ���Allahu Akhbar��� during his crimes, made routinely now on every one of these occasions, are in serious dispute.

 

We also know, thanks his wife���s testimony and to a post mortem, that Omar Mateen, the rampage killer in Orlando, was (like Anders Breivik and the British rampage killer Raoul Moat) on steroids. For those interested in such details, Breivik (by his own account, without which we would not know)  took a substance called Stanozolol, together with the amphetamine analogue ephedrine.

 

I do not think my case for an inquiry into the apparent correlation between drug use and such actions is any weaker following these events. 

'Dyslexia' - a pernicious myth exploded,

The following articles. published in the Mail on Sunday on 2nd March and 3rd June 2007, are for some reason not easily found in the archives of this blog. As I'm currently running into various people who still think this imaginary complaint exists, I thought I would revive them and post them here.

 

Dyslexia is not a disease. It is an excuse for bad teachers
By: Peter Hitchens

I DOUBT there has ever been a society so easily fooled by pseudo-science and quackery as ours is. Millions of healthy people take happy pills that do them obvious harm, and are increasingly correlated with inexplicable suicide and worse.

Legions of healthy children are drugged into numbness because they fidget during boring lessons, and countless people are persuaded that they or their children suffer from a supposed disease called 'dyslexia', even though there is no evidence at all that it exists.

A few weeks ago I rejoiced at the first major cracks in this great towering dam of lies. Dr Richard Saul brought out his courageous and overdue book, ADHD Does Not Exist.

I also urge everyone to read James Davies's book Cracked, on the inflated claims of psychiatry since it sold its soul to the pill-makers.

Now comes The Dyslexia Debate, published yesterday, a rigorous study of this alleged ailment by two distinguished academics - Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University, and Professor Elena Grigorenko of Yale University. Their book makes several points. There is no clear definition of what 'dyslexia' is. There is no objective diagnosis of it. Nobody can agree on how many people suffer from it. The widespread belief that it is linked with high intelligence does not stand up to analysis.

And, as Parliament's Select Committee on Science and Technology said in 2009: 'There is no convincing evidence that if a child with dyslexia is not labelled as dyslexic, but receives full support for his or her reading difficulty, that the child will do any worse than a child who is labelled dyslexic and then receives special help.' THIS is because both are given exactly the same treatment. But as the book's authors say: 'Being labelled dyslexic can be perceived as desirable for many reasons.' These include extra resources and extra time in exams. And then there's the hope that it will 'reduce the shame and embarrassment that are often the consequence of literacy difficulties. It may help exculpate the child, parents and teachers from any perceived sense of responsibility'.

I think that last point is the decisive one and the reason for the beetroot-faced fury that greets any critic of 'dyslexia' (and will probably greet this book and article). If it's really a disease, it's nobody's fault. But it is somebody's fault. For the book also describes the furious resistance, among teachers, to proven methods of teaching children to read. Such methods have been advocated by experts since Rudolf Flesch wrote his devastating book Why Johnny Can't Read almost 60 years ago.

There may well be a small number of children who have physical problems that stop them learning to read. The invention of 'dyslexia' does nothing to help them. It means they are uselessly lumped in with millions of others who have simply been badly taught.

It also does nothing for that great majority of poor readers. They are robbed of one of life's great pleasures and essential skills.

What they need, what we all need, is proper old-fashioned teaching, and who cares if the silly teachers think it is 'authoritarian'? That's what teaching is.








DYSLEXIA? A FANTASY TO EXCUSE THE LIBERAL WRECKERS
By: PETER HITCHENS

DONNING my stab proof vest and my anti-slime suit, I'd like to praise Professor Julian Elliott of Durham University for daring to state the truth.

Dyslexia is a fantasy.

This is especially important in the exam season.

A bewildering number of students claim extra time, demand differently coloured question papers or are issued with equipment worth up to ��10,000 ��� at our expense ��� on the grounds that they are sufferers from this fictional complaint.

Those who take their exams without these things are, with reason, growing more and more resentful about this special treatment.

Like its equally suspect cousin 'ADHD', dyslexia is a symptom of a society in trouble and an education system wrecked by liberals.

Rather than admit their policies are wrong, the liberals pretend millions of perfectly healthy, intelligent young people are in some way disabled.

Their really clever move is to persuade the victims of this trick to rejoice in their victimhood.

The enraged letters and emails I shall now get, claiming to be 'insulted', will come from healthy, intelligent people who actually want to believe they have 'dyslexia', or from their parents.

Perhaps a small minority of them really do have something physically wrong with them.

If so, their cases are completely different from the majority, and shouldn't be bracketed with them.

Most alleged dyslexics have simply never been taught to read properly, thanks to some of the worst schools in the rich world and the dogmatic refusal of many teachers to use the one tried, effective method ��� synthetic phonics.

Instead, even now, many persist in the 'mixture of methods' which confuses pupils. It often also confuses parents who are assured that synthetic phonics are part of this mixture. But phonics must be taught exclusively to work.

Meanwhile, TV and computer games have displaced books in most children's lives.

Few now read regularly for pleasure. Without Harry Potter there would be fewer still.

Professor Elliott, an educational psychologist, points out that there is no clear diagnosis of dyslexia.There are at least 28 different definitions of it.

Yet parents, alleged sufferers and teachers actively welcome the classification ��� as it relieves them of responsibility for the trouble.

But in countries where this fad is not indulged, the schools still teach reading properly.

And these countries are our rivals in a world where a growing contest for scarce energy means Britain's days of wealthy security may be numbered ��� and will be numbered if we don't stop making excuses for ourselves.

BBC Radio 4 Any Questions today

Some readers may be interested in listening to the latest edition of BBC Radio 4's 'Any Questions' recorded last night in Derby and available either here 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07ks4m6

or during the broadcast repeat after the 1.00 p,m. news on BBC Radio 4 today.

Subjects include the referendum result, terrorism, the Labour Party and Pokemon Go, whatever that is.